For those of you that have led large-scale SAP S/4HANA migrations, have any of you provided users with a sandbox environment prior to going live to facilitate training, adoption and change management? Can you share good or bad experiences?
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Over the past few years, we completed a multi‑stage journey that took us from a sizeable on‑premise SAP landscape, through an intermediate SAP S/4HANA on‑prem conversion, and ultimately to SAP S/4HANA on RISE. Along the way, we learned a great deal about enabling user readiness and managing change at scale. Did we provide a sandbox? Not exactly, but we did something more structured.
Our landscape consists of four environments:
- DEV – pure development, no business data
- TEST – limited data set for functional testing
- ACCEPTANCE (UAT) – monthly production copy, full business data
- PRODUCTION
Rather than offering an open sandbox, we chose to leverage our Acceptance environment as the primary place for user training, process validation and exploring new features. Because it contains real, full‑scale data and reflects production behaviour, it proved far more effective than a traditional sandbox.
Our migration approach
We started by taking a full production copy into a new environment and performed the S/4HANA conversion there. Only after closing all functional gaps and stabilizing the system did we move forward.
One major complexity: Our environment contains roughly 100,000 lines of custom ABAP code!
This meant that during the testing period, the outside world did not stand still. We had to maintain dual development tracks, applying fixes in both legacy and converted systems, a non‑negotiable reality for organizations with heavily customized landscapes. During go‑live, we prioritized stabilizing Production and Acceptance first. DEV and TEST were recreated afterwards from the unified code base to avoid running multiple data conversions.
Project duration & critical success factors: The entire program took approximately nine months.
Our biggest success factors were:
- A strong migration partner
- Dedicated internal project leadership with deep infrastructure understanding
- Tight collaboration with our infra and networking teams
Surprisingly, the hardest challenges weren’t purely SAP-related, they were around:Configuring network ports, Security alignment, File transfer setup however the conversion of ABAP code was not a walk in the park it went well.
Why we use Acceptance as our “sandbox”: For training and change enablement, our Acceptance environment has proven extremely effective:
- It mirrors production closely
- It helps users recognize real‑world transactions and data
- It supports realistic performance expectations
- It reduces surprises during go‑live
Because we treat it as a near‑production system during office hours, we also apply a strict release calendar, mirroring our production governance.
Good experiences? Absolutely. Bad experiences? Only when things weren’t aligned.
A real‑data UAT environment improved adoption dramatically. Users trained with confidence because they saw their own processes and data reflected back to them. Where we faced challenges was when infrastructure configuration lagged behind application readiness, a valuable reminder that SAP transformations are as much infrastructure projects as they are application projects.
I agree, the sandbox environment for subject matter expert end users provides quality feedback and insights for the technical team, involve them in some QA testing and as you noted it will provide awareness and knowledge to facilitate the changes that they can share with teams.